Functional redundancy in ecology and conservation

Multiple studies have shown that biodiversity loss can impair ecosystem processes, providing a sound basis for the general application of a precautionary approach to managing biodiversity. However, mechanistic details of species loss effects and the generality of impacts across ecosystem types are poorly understood. The functional niche is a useful conceptual tool for understanding redundancy, where the functional niche is defined as the area occupied by a species in an n‐dimensional functional space. Experiments to assess redundancy based on a single functional attribute are biased towards finding redundancy, because species are more likely to have non‐overlapping functional niches in a multi‐dimensional…